The Muslim bus driver who told his passenger to get off so he could pray

Turns out that “Muslim news story” was garbage.

“Schools to teach the Qur’an”

Apparently the National Union of Teachers has called for the end of separate faith schools and instead for “faith-based instruction, prayer facilities and a choice of religious holidays” to be introduced into all schools.

Don’t have much time to discuss this story, but you can be certain the right-wing press had a field day; even the BBC got in on the act.

Muslim when they’re not Muslim

Paul Berman writes in an op-ed for the New York Times:

[In] Western countries, quite a few Muslim liberals, the outspoken ones, live today under a threat of assassination, not to mention a reality of character assassination. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-Dutch legislator and writer, is merely an exceptionally valiant example.

Silly me. Here I was thinking Hirsi Ali had been quite open about saying she was “not a Muslim anymore”.

‘Question Time’ has ‘pro-Tory bias’

Liberal Democratic Voice has a response from the BBC to their charge that Question Time invites more Conservative politicians or those with views to the right, than Labour or  liberal voices. A breakdown of the panellists for the past year is available online.

Lack of deference is not equivalent to being truthful

Glenn Greenwald has a post on the clash between American pundit Tucker Carlson and British journalist Gerri Peev of The Scotsman. If you haven’t followed this story, here’s a synopsis: Peev interviewed Samantha Power, a foreign policy advisor to Barack Obama. In the interview Power called Hillary Clinton a “monster”. Power was then basically required to resign. In a televised interview with Peev, Carlson took umbrage at the fact that Power had asked Peev to scrub the comment from the interview. Peev responded saying no such “off the record” agreement had been made and the tapes were rolling — too bad for Power.

In his piece, Greenwald compares the deferential attitude of the American media (in general, not just newspapers) to the lack of such deference in the British media; Greenwald links to numerous clips of Paxman making politicians look foolish.

While my completely unquantiative and purely subjective view is that this difference between American and British press is right (and perhaps even the wider media), I think Greenwald, and others, should be careful not confuse a lack of deference for an honest pursuit of ‘the truth’. British newspaper journalists might laud the fact that their ‘trade’ has not succombed to the self-importance of being a ‘profession’ and so perhaps remaining more ‘inquisitive’; but time and again, they have been shown to been outright liars, frauds and hypocrites. I don’t think we have anything to crow about in Britain when it comes to journalistic standards.

Bishop makes controversial remarks, receives death threat

A bishop makes controversial comments. He receives death threats as a result. The death threats make the headlines on a major global news outlet and elicit a response from political and religious leaders in Britain…

Except what I am referring to is not Michael “No-Go” Nazir-Ali, but a bishop who made positive, rather than negative, comments regarding Muslims.

John Pritchard, Bishop of Oxford, says he has received a death threat in response to his support for the call to prayer to be aired in Oxford. But where’s the outrage? Where are the political and civic leaders condeming the threats?

Julaybib Ayoub has a done a quick review of the column inches dedicated to the Nazir Ali and Pritchard stories in the Telegraph. Unsurprisingly, the Nazir-Ali death threat story received much more attention (524 words, compared to 138 for the Pritchard death threat story). He concludes:

According to certain media outlets, it would seem the lives of people who are sympathetic to Muslims are worth less than those who spew venom upon us. A death threat against a Muslim critic is an outrage. A death threat against a friend of Muslims is barely news.

(The BBC has, however, reported the threat against Pritchard’s life.)

So far, though, no religious or political leaders have made any remarks on the death threat and whether such a threat constitutes an attack on ‘British values’.

Update: Julaybib Ayoub has more.

Israel ‘responds’, Palestinians ‘massacre’

Here is how Open House, the Independent’s main blog, phrased its Have Your Say thread on the murder of Israelis at a seminary in Jerusalem:

Notice how the killings were an atrocity and portrayed as a threat to the ‘peace process’ by the Open House blogger(s).

And here is how Open House reported the 100+ Palestinian deaths (which included many civilians and children) at the hands of Israel’s military:

Notice the neutral language: Israel was merely ‘responding’ to attacks from Palestinian groups. There is no sign of whether the Open House blogger thought these deaths at the hands of Israel threatened ‘peace’.

Con Coughlin: moron

Con “45 minutes” Coughlin is at it again:

[S]ay what you like about Arafat, he knew how to keep order, and it is unlikely Hamas would have been able to establish its own self-contained fiefdom in Gaza were he still alive. Arafat, the veteran of many minor civil wars between rival Palestinian groups, took a dim view of people who challenged his authority, and would have dealt harshly with the Hamas upstarts.

Coughlin is meant to be the Telegraph’s executive foreign editor, yet he makes no mention of one of the biggest news foreign news stories this past week: the leak of confidential papers and insider information that showing US backed a Fatah coup, which in turn was preempted by Hamas in Gaza. No where, while blaming the Palestinians, does Coughlin show his readers that things are a little more complicated than they appear.

And this man is the Telegraph’s executive foreign editor?

Seriously, what are the Telegraph paying this man? He’s absolutely rubbish.

Ruth Gledhill’s dodgy caliphate factoids

Ruth Gledhill, Times correspondent on religion and blogger, had a post on the controversial Turkish hadith project. I think I have said as much as I can about this topic, but wanted to note a glaring historical error in her blog post. She writes:

[‘Interpretation’ of texts] was the general practice until about 1400, when the Caliphate, based in Turkey, announced that this process of interpretation was closed. The Caliphate decreed that Islam had reached such a state of perfection, no further reasoning was necessary.

I have no idea where she got the impression that around 1400 the Caliphate was in “Turkey” (there was no state-like entity called “Turkey” in 1400!). Nor do I know how she (or the Times correspondent Michael Binyon who she says she spoke to) formed the idea that the caliphate made a decree that the “process of interpretation was closed”.

Starting with the plainer facts, it should be noted that the Abbasid Caliphate was brought to a shuddering halt in 1258 at the hands of the Mongols (who committed something of a ‘holocaust’ against the people of this area), when they sacked Baghdad. Thereafter, a ‘shadow’ caliphate existed in Cairo under the patronage of the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt, who installed a relative of the Abbasids to the role of caliph (and it doesn’t take a PhD in Islamic history to work out where the power rested in that political relationship). When the Ottomans ended Mamluk independence in 1517, one might naturally assume they took on the role of caliphs; such a view would be understandable, although there is some controversy over this. Around 1400, the Ottomans themselves were still growing as an empire. And even when they did acquire Mamluk lands in the 1500s, there is a question mark over whether had indeed become caliphs. In fact, it is suggested the Ottomans did not use the title of caliph with any real vigour (preferring the title of sultan like other dynastic empires before them) until 1774 at the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca. (I think it is also worth mentioning that in Muslim Spain, which came to an end by the mid-1400s, a rival caliphate was also announced; and this all without even considering the Shi’i claims to leadership of Islam.)

Next, I have to say Gledhill’s claim that “the Caliphate decreed that Islam had reached such a state of perfection [that] no further reasoning was necessary” is nonsensical. There are two parts to this.

First, as a matter of faith, Islam is “perfect” for Muslims as the sources of religion (the Qur’an and the prophetic sunna) are considered completed: nothing can be added or taken from these sources.

The second part to this, and in some ways more important, is that slippery word interpretation. I am not aware that the caliphate decreed “reasoning unnecessary” in 1400 (for, as we have just discussed, there was no actual caliphate with the power to do so in or around 1400). In fact, most charges of the closure of ‘reasoning’ are laid at the feet of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, who lived and died long before 1400. Aside from this claim being historically inaccurate and a gross misrepresentation of al-Ghazali’s views, as discussed by some (Western) scholars of Islamic history, it is a wholly mistaken notion that ‘reasoning’ came to an end amongst Muslims. As I noted in my brief note on the Turkish hadith project, it is almost always the case that the extent and the scope of interpretation, and the question of who can undertake such a task, is the source of intellectual conflict amongst Muslims, not merely the idea of ‘reasoning’ from Islamic texts.

People who we can loosely call ‘traditionalists’ view the boundaries of intellectual conflict have been formed and settled upon, and it is within these confines (which are larger than you think) that reasoning can continue to take place, albeit in the hands of a specialist trained in Islamic knowledges. (For example, Muslims who want answers to a novel situation they find themselves in have traditionally turned to someone who is considered suitably trained. How does this problem get resolved? The trained specialist will turn to various texts and ‘reason’ from them.) On the other side of the divide, are those who we can loosely label ‘modernists’ do not hold these boundaries to be boundaries at all, but outcomes of time and place (i.e. history). They feel these boundaries can be re-created and re-formed by different communities. And then there are a whole set of people who are somewhere in between (in fact, my traditionalist/modernist dividing line is porous).

While I agree the second part of my response to Gledhill — on the need for reasoning — is a source of perpetual conflict amongst Muslims (so understandable if she is unable to provide the whole picture), checking basic facts like the existence (or not) of caliphates is very easy. I don’t think this is specifically a “Muslim problem” journalists like Gledhill have (and again this is understandable as they are less familiar with Muslim themes and histories). Rather it is a general problem with ‘churnalism’, where facts are loose or don’t exist and you can just make things up if you need to. And blogging only makes churnalism easier — afterall, “it’s only a blog”, so who cares right?

Having said that, this is the second time someone writing for the Times has just made up what can be considered rather basic historical facts when it comes to discussing topics involving Muslims. Last year, I noticed Michael Burleigh doing the same thing, and he is meant to have a PhD in history.

How many civilians were killed by Harry?

[The broadsheet] coverage was sycophantic in the extreme, relating how Harry had retrained as a “forward air controller”, reiterating how he was sitting in front of “Kill TV” or “Taliban TV” directing American F15 jets to their targets. None of them ever felt the need to question whether this is the best way to fight the war, or that human rights organisations estimate that over 230 civilians were killed in air strikes in Afghanistan in 2006, leading Hamid Karzai to plead in tears for the coalition forces to stop being so cavalier with the lives of those on ground. That might have been unpatriotic, or been construed as suggesting that Harry had killed civilians while blasting the 30 Taliban the Sun claimed he had eviscerated. They didn’t point out when Harry said this was about “as normal as I’m ever going to get” that there is nothing ordinary about making life or death decisions through a computer monitor. We viciously attack suicide bombers or other terrorists for their cowardly nature, and are often right, but there is very little difference between that and the end result of dropping 500lb bombs from however many feet in the air onto houses which may or may not be full of Terry Taliban, directed from somewhere far removed via a screen.

Source.